Imagine a world where everything goes your way. Imagine a world where you succeed in everything you attempt. Imagine a world where every wish you make comes true.

For this to happen, all potentials for opposition would have to be removed. Therefore, one’s heart and will would be unrestrained. Is this a wise situation?

For such a thing to be possible we would have to be born with UNLIMITED WISDOM. We would be excused from all education because learning often requires things going wrong, making mistakes, and learning that our better judgment requires seeing the bigger picture and even being subservient to the wishes of others.

For one thing, success has no meaning or quality without some opposition, which defines the parameters of an undertaking and allows us to measure the success.

Unfortunately, the other problem is that we are not born into such wisdom. And without wisdom, if everything went our way, what parameters would we set on our good fortunes? Without parameters, other people for sure, would suffer for our endless success.

Endless success would grow into an obsession and the desire to rule over others and in acquiring all wealth. Without a means for obtaining wisdom, how would we ever learn to have regard for others?

So the world is cleverly governed by God to offer opposition, disappointment, tragedy, misfortune and suffering. But God only does so in a way that best serves the eternal purpose of creation and salvation. This seems unfair, but most of us will admit that we have had to learn many lessons the hard way.

So one of the Creator’s most important activities of Divine Infinite Love is to play the role of everyone’s antagonist wherever wisdom is lacking and needed.

If we knew what God wanted for us it would most always go against our worldly wishes and ambitions. As proof, how much does love for the neighbor play a role in our current efforts of getting ahead in life and in the promotion of our personal status?

What if you had visible evidence that God always got in the way of our biggest ambitions because such worldly success would increase self-centeredness and interfere with your eternal happiness and peace?

The answer is that you would be enraged.

You would have a burning hatred of God if you saw a divine hand involved in your misfortunes, while allowing someone else to enjoy a lucky streak.

What is not known is that ego-centeredness, and a heart moved only towards seeking one’s own advantage is spiritual profanation. We separate our hearts from Christian faith when we are always looking out for “number one.” This is the biggest killer of religious faith.

Therefore, when bad things happen to good people, it is a good thing from an eternal point of view. It is a sign from God that we are still savable.

All anger, frustration, rage, and disappointment, comes from something interfering with our heart’s desire. Whatever gets in our way quickly is identified as the “enemy.” But we should always evaluate our values. God is constantly trying to change our hearts to desire heaven and a spiritual life of mutual love. Mutual love is what constitutes true heavenly blessedness.

It is essential to spiritual growth that the Lord God challenges who we are, and the false idea that we know what’s best for us. Without wisdom, all we can know is what we like, not what is best.

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About thegodguy

EDWARD F. SYLVIA, M.T.S.
Philosopher/Theologian Edward F. Sylvia attended the School of Visual Arts in New York and received his Master of Theological Studies at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, CA and a Certificate of Swedenborgian Studies from the Swedenborgian House of Studies. He is a member of the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences (C.T.N.S.) and the Swedenborg Scientific Association (S.S.A.).
Award-winning author of "Sermon From the Compost Pile: Seven Steps Toward Creating An Inner Garden" and "Proving God," which fulfills a continuing vision that God’s fingerprints of love can be found everywhere in the manifest universe. His most recent book, "Swedenborg & Gurdjieff: The Missing Links" is an edgy collection of anti-intuitive essays for personal transformation that challenges and inspires.
He has been a student of the ideas of both Emanuel Swedenborg and George I. Gurdjieff for over thirty years. Read more about TheGodGuy, his books and his ideas at http://www.staircasepress.com

17 Responses to Why God is the best enemy to have

Not a bad thought. You expressed them clearly and with good writing. However, I might disagree a little bit.

You wrote: “If we knew what God wanted for us it would most always go against our worldly wishes and ambitions.”

This line can go two ways. I think you’re right when you talk about the ultimate goal of these wishes and ambitions – or the conscious goal, rather. Our conscious goal can be self-centered.

But I also believe in way two. This way says that God puts desires in us that are for his purpose. So, perhaps we take these desires he gives us and we try to work them to our advantage, instead of embracing what he really meant for us (which is REALLY to our advantage, if you understand me).

Nice post. I just want to add one more thing. We (by this i mean all the religions and not merely the Christian faith) for ages have assumed that we and God are ‘two’ Is there any basis for such assumption. By God, we mean ‘omnipotent, omnipresent, and above time, space, and reason” Having said that, God is everywhere. If he is everywhere than we must be getting born, living, and dying in God himself. Whatever is there is dwelling in god. whereever there is creation (galaxies, stars, planets), whereever there is destruction and whereever there is nothing, its all happening in God. God has always been there and it will for ever and we are so small, helpless with a few grams of brain in our head, we cannot say that god and us are different. Like a wave forms in an ocean, it takes shape and size, it rises up, and then it falls and vanishes. The wave was a part of ocean, it got created in ocean, it tried to rise above that is its life period, then it died and become part of ocean. Same is we and god.

Thank you for your comments. I hinted at your way “two” by suggesting that God only permits things to happen “in a way that best serves the eternal purpose of creation and salvation” (whether we can understand and accept this or not).

Of course, God puts desires in us that we try to work to our personal advantage. But the “devil” is in the details. So, what do you mean by personal advantage? Is it to gain a better heart or is it to gain a flat screen TV?

The Lord challenges each of us to find unconditional love – where the reward of goodness is goodness itself. This takes a lot of sacrifice and sincere humility.

The fact that we grow old and die, is an example of how God offers us daily opportunity to find humility and seek what is eternally most essential to our peace and happiness.

Actually, there is a basis for assuming that we and God our “two.” Your analogy of using a wave and an ocean as showing our oneness with the Creator assumes that the only difference between us and God is a quantitative one. This implies that like a wave in an ocean we humans are the same substance and “stuff” as God.

But if the act of creation was CONTINUOUS with God, creation and nature would be God, and not simply, if I may use the expression, a mirror image of God.

This presents a theological problem if one believes God is Infinite Love. For it suggests that God’s love for humanity is in actuality a form of Divine Self-Love. True love is based on loving something other than itself, which means loving something that is not the same as what is infinite.

The created world consists of finite forms.

LOVE NEEDS A SUBJECT – the created world offers a subject for which God can direct that love. Furthermore, for love to be complete, love needs to be reciprocal. So a creature has to emerge in creation with the intelligence and consciousness to recognize the existence of God and ultimately love God back.

So religion (all religion) is God’s strategy for allowing humans to enter into a relationship with the divine, which is the means by which we can acquire eternal life and happiness.

Your analogy of wave and ocean also has scientific significance. It works if spacetime is a continuum as Einstein believed. But it does not work when applied to quantum physics, which suggests that space may consist of discrete (discontinuous) structures. Your analogy runs into even more difficulty if the ontological status and architecture of reality is hierarchically layered (there would then be distinct jumps of activity between the causal links and nexus connecting the Creator and the created).

I am actually working on a book project that will go more deeply into these very issues.

Thanks for the wonderful explaination, I got your point. When we say that we are a consciousness which can recognize his existance and love him back that would mean the infinity let the consciousness evolve into humans and the humans love him back. Why would the omnipotent or infinite require our love and for what? To worship and to praise him. And whatever term we use, like love and hatred, life and death, these are relative terms. Infinite is above life and death, creation and destruction. Nothing gets formed from nothingness to somethingness nor ends into nothingness. The problems arises when we think from the way we are made to think. Why should we assume if there is a creation there has to be a creator, because we are programed to think like that from our births. But here we are dealing with infinite I do not see a way to think anything about infinite with this mind. this is something above and beyond this restraints of mind and when i say this i mean when God is present, we are not; and when we think ourselves as something very intelligent, God is unthinkable. Only one way we can realize him, and this, by being him. When we realize we are part of him and we always were a part.
I look forward for your project. I am too working on a book.
C u soon.

I wish you the best in your book project as well – whether or not we would actually agree on what constitutes matters of ultimate reality. We need more people who are willing to give serious thought to these issues

My book will go into the challenging issue of how the infinite has relation to the finite. God does wish to become known to us, and, while God is beyond the range of the human mind we possess higher cognitive functions that are untapped, yet can grasp the idea of God more perfectly than we now do (even though the topic is inexhaustible).

The Infinite expresses itself in finite things, otherwise God would have created the world through dissimilarity, leaving no possibility for a relationship between God and the manifest universe. One could surmise from finite things, and from nature’s incessant drive towards self-organization and bio-complexity, that the universe is a physical analog of LOVE – since the essence of love is to unify, and all things become unified into units of complexity through mutual support.

I think God ALLOWS life to happen (Stuff Happens) rather than PERMITS which implies He chooses what happens to us. He allows us to experience the natural forces and circumstances of the world and gives us the freedom to respond and to learn. Of course, sometimes we don’t learn or respond so well. Personally, low points in my life have made me a better person, but I don’t think God specifically sent those low points my way, rather they happened and God steered me through them even when at first I did not see him. Poor Britney Spears, did God permit her material success so she could take a nosedive or did that just happen and God is waiting for her to see the light.

Certainly Swedenborg’s Divine Providence puts “this” subject into perspective. But my blog title helps to highlight a fresh angle in assisting one to understand why God does the things God does! The Lord God doesn’t just caress us with resplendent love. The Lord challenges what we love.

We are in total agreement. My concern is that in a “church environment” the process and struggle of regeneration is downplayed. Pastoral care has almost nothing to do with helping one combat his or her inner hells. The problem the church has is that it cannot “fill seats” by telling people about the profound evil of their wills – so they push the notion of goodness. But you can’t rush directly into goodness without FIRST “cleaning house.” The first action of charity is to resist evil (much of which hides itself from our habitual detection and flawed vigilance).

The Lord God is introducing a whole new faith-system to the world. Since this is happening during a time when science is so prevalent, I have chosen (in my blog and books) to offer ways of unifying science with theology through the full spectrum of Swedenborg’s writings. Such an undertaking has not happened in Swedenborgian circles for over a hundred years!